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"Don't be ridiculous." Pyra flicks her hand in dismissal. "It's just a microphone. It can't talk."
"Something's communicating with us. Don't you think we should at least try'n listen?" Lurch shifts uncomfortably on the table, trying not to wince at Pyra's prodding. She'd promised they wouldn't have to deal with pesky nerve endings at all, but it turns out Pyra's hypotheses are not as bulletproof as she would have the team believe.
Team. They're barely a team, really. Half of them won't even get close to Lurch. At least Dep gets to hide in the shadows , Lurch thinks bitterly.
Out here I have to pretend to breathe like all the rest of them. Out here I have to remember to close my eyes when I sleep.
They try to be kind. All of them do. But there's a stain on undeadness in the league. A sword-shaped shadow that hangs overhead. Lurch sees it sometimes in the mirror-- just a ghost in the corner of their eye. A blade, bloodied and purple-blue, shaking with frantic light. Pushed violently through the front of their chest. It goes away the second they try to focus on it, but every time it happens they can feel the Tug renewed. Something heavy, an anchorweight tying them to the ground. Tying them to the game.
They haven't told Pyra.
She wouldn't care, anyway. Not in the way Lurch wants her to, at least. 'You're imagining things again, aren't you? Sit. Describe it to me. Describe it all.'
Lurch would love to tell her where she can shove her clinical fascination.
They've read the rulebook of the game they all play. So has Pyra, although Lurch suspects she believes it doesn't apply to her. Pyra, in all her glassy hubris, muttering to herself in the corner of her lab. Incineration might be the only way out, but not for her. Not for the woman who raises the dead, stitching them back together with tape and theory. When Pyra says she's proud of Lurch, it isn't any type of pride Lurch wants.
No, Pyra can keep that kind. Up on the wall with her diplomas and her research.
She'd tack Lurch themself up there if she could. But they're both, by nature, of the ceaseless diamond. They both have a game to play.
Someday, Lurch thinks. Staring at the pink storm swallowing the sky. Tuning their thoughts to the fragments of staticky voices on the wind. Someday, Pyre. Woman who undoes the burning. Someday I'll find something even you can't twist .
The mic stand is alone in the center of the field. Neon fuschia ghost light on the world’s hungriest stage.
Low power.
Showering sparks of pink fly from the base of the microphone. It’s colder here than most of Hellmouth; the Solarium at night is even more subject to the temperaments of weather than usual.
Low power.
“I know,” Lurch says, eyes drinking in the neon light as though they haven’t seen color in years. “What d’you need me to do?”
Low power. Searching for signal.
“Well alright. What happens when you lose the signal?”
Searching.
“If I go with you… what happens to the others?”
Searching. Searching.
Lurch has died before, in both the standard direction and in reverse. They know what the tingling under their skin means. Knows what it means when the hair on their arms stands up as the electric pink lightning dances around their fingers.
Life. It means life.
Battery dying.
They know what that’s like.
Lurch never understood what people meant when they would say that feedback carries you. Like a current. This isn’t being carried – it’s being invited. Waved along by echoes of energy, bright and hungry and desperate to connect. Stretching out in supercharged threads. A makeshift defibrillator.
Losing contact .
Pyra was right about one thing: the mic doesn’t talk. But something in it does. Something in it is dying. Something in it needs to be brought back to life.
'Watch me do your job, Pyra ,' Lurch thinks with a grimace.
Signal failing.
“Hold on a little longer,” Lurch murmurs, hand hovering above the cold black metal. “You’ll be alright.”
Signal…failing.
“...Where do you go? After all this? 2 weeks is a pretty short life, y'know. Where you headed next?”
Help .
“Take me with you, then?”
Help .
“Sure, kiddo. Just promise to show me where those voices are comin’ from. That’s somewhere I wanna see.”
<CHARGE BATTERY IMMEDIATELY>
The lightning finds Lurch’s heart.
Thump-thump.
‘So that’s what that feels like .’ Lurch remembers, shaking their head with a lousy, disbelieving grin. ‘Oh, Pyra. You left out so much.’
The dancing flame over Lurch’s head takes a final bow before it’s drawn up into smoke and ozone. Their cheeks flush deep in the pink light, quiet audience of empty stadium seats arcing up triumphantly around them. It’s all they can see beyond the glow; the rest of the stadium fades into darkness beyond.
<CHARGE BATTERY IMMEDIATELY>
Lurch folds their hand around the mic. Tiny smile crossing their face.
The shock of the metal is the last thing they feel before they are drawn out into nothing; until they are dispersed into sound, fused with the atmosphere. A mind without a body. A voice without the cords.
It’s their first rebirth that doesn’t hurt.
POWER RESTORED .
The relief that floods Lurch is both theirs and not; someone else is thinking in their head alongside them.
Someone terrified. Lonely. Grateful.
“Hey, there, eye in the sky,” Lurch says gently, new voice spread thin over a sputtering airwave. “Nice to meet you.”
“Ha, ha. This thing on?”
Lurch . Pyra’s heart jumps with frantic fury. The tiny field radio on her desk whines up to a fever pitch of static. It startles her so badly she nearly knocks it to the floor, and a tin of pens goes clattering to the ground in its place.
“Mondavi. What did you do?”
Gods, if it’s what she thinks it is, she’s gonna have to tell Deputy. She’s gonna have to log the loss of a subject. She’s gonna have to keep playing here, along with all the others, forgotten by their own lonely panopticon. The intrepid observer, bored of their antics. Searching for a new stage to set.
“Lurch.” Pyra taps the radio, yanking the volume dial to maximum. The signal spits and hisses, stubborn under Pyra’s demanding hand.
“Sorry, Pyra,” Lurch says through the radio, tinny and distant.
Pyra grips the radio in her hands, shaking it. Staring down through fogged glasses as the Hellmouth sighs with relief at the snapping of yet another unnaturally-bound tether. Furious feedback storm droning in her ears, throwing out fragments of bodiless voices that she’s always claimed she can’t hear. Lurch’s is among them now, reeling with freedom. Razor-edged with victory. Weightless, effortless, natural. Like she’s never heard them before, even when were alive the first time.
Pyra would have traded her soul for this.
She chokes past the howl of fury trapped in her throat, pressing the radio up to her ear. Desperate for a foothold in the noise. Desperate to draw Lurch’s voice out from the rest, before they all twist together into the din. Before they mutate into something she doesn't understand.
You were a masterpiece , she wants to yell. Why would you leave that behind ?
Lurch is laughing, somehow. Their laugh was never loud; it was always the trim to the fabric of their voice. Lace along the edge. They laugh the way they do whenever they tell a particularly grim joke.
(“Gallows humor,” they'd always say. Tossing a playful smirk at Pyra’s pinched expression. “If you don’t like it, shouldn’ta raised me from the dead.”)
“Tell another joke,” Pyra begs. Furiously uncharacteristic.
So, crackling with static, Lurch does.
“Don’t think you can bring me back from this one.”